How To Construct a Political Ideology - Summary

This last week I've been writing on how to create a political ideology in a constructive manner. The goal was to create a guide which lets one think about the most important questions in politics while not first deciding that one is a conservative, social-democrat, feminist, libertarian, or any other political identity with a certain script to follow.

The essence of the tutorial is to make lists on the most important topics in politics. Here is a summary of all the lists one should make:

1. The most important political goals you want to achieve, without stating what particular means are best appropriate for them (e.g. world peace, prosperity, freedom).
   (Choose That Which is Most Important to You.)
   
2. All societies/political systems.
3. Those beliefs you have which explain most about human behavior and how our societies function.
4. Those beliefs you have which dismisses most political systems as not being best suited to your preferences.
5. Those ideas which, if they were true, would dismiss most political systems.
   (Consider the Most Important Facts.)
   
6. All political strategies.
7. Those beliefs you have which explain most about how we change our behavior.
8. Those beliefs you have which dismisses most political strategies as too costly to reach your goal.
9. Those ideas which, if they were true, would dismiss most political strategies.
   (Change the World in the Most Efficient Manner.)
   
10. All frequently asked questions about your political choice and your answer to them.
11. Thoughts experiments showing that someone might not really want their highest valued political goal.
12. The most important facts which dismiss a particular political choice.
    (Discuss the Most Important Points.)

Every list is necessary to get a complete ideology but 1 to 5 are, by far, the most important ones. Because, by solving these points you are able to tell which type of society is the best.

Besides writing down these lists one should also consider the different benefits and costs of striving towards a political goal. If the best societies one can think of are reached by means which make it harder to reach another good society, it could be that the second (or third) best society is better than the first, if the cost of reaching them are sufficiently low. (Strive Towards the (Second) Best Society.)

I have also written a little bit about alliances (A Digression on Alliances) and what I mean by politics (The Domain of Politics).

In the next post I'll show my own political perspective, which is only partially complete, using this framework.

Discuss the Most Important Points

Followup to: A Digression on Alliances

If your political strategy calls for you to convince others* that your cause is just and right, you should be able to present the most compelling arguments for your case. This means you need to be very familiar with your own reasoning, with those values and facts you believe to be the most important for shaping your political choice. This does not mean that the best way of convincing someone is by stating propositions, although I believe it has a positive appeal for 10-90% of the population.

At best you shouldn't discuss the solution, the society you want, but focus on the facts which support it. Because, you will maybe need to shift your position if the one you debate with shows that one or several of your beliefs are mistaken. And that is probably easier when not feeling such an attachment to the ultimate society. But, this is probably impossible because most people will want to know about this society, and how it functions, from you. So, you'll need to learn how to discuss questions about it. That is, you'll need to create a list of F.A.Q. on your own politics.

It should also be necessary to discuss other political choices and why they are not as good as your own, to those you wish to convince. This can be done in two ways: influencing someone's goals or influencing their most important factual beliefs about the world. The first one can possibly by done by thought experiments to show someone what their true preferences are. The second by reasonings on how a particular society will not achieve the objectives sought after. And these lists need to be multiplied by the number of seriously considered alternatives.

For this post I don't have any list at all since they are entirely dependent on what debate one engages in.

* This might not be important at all for several reasons. You might be in a political group with a division of labor where someone else is comparatively better at communication. You might be able to reach your goal already. Your other political actions might speak louder than words.

A Digression on Alliances

Followup to: Change the World in the Most Efficient Manner

For most political strategies to work, it's necessary to cooperate with others. Here I'll discuss what the members of alliances can have in common, how the alliances can be structured, and how secret they can be.

Alliances of Preferences, Perspectives, and End Goals

There can exist at least four types of alliances, those of:

• preferences, where everyone cares about roughly the same values;
• perspectives (on society), where everyone has the same model on how societies work;
• perspectives (on strategies), where everyone believe that a certain was of action is the best one to follow; and
• end goals, where everyone wants to achieve the same society (albeit maybe for different reasons and with different strategies).

The ultimate alliance would then be between those who share the same views on all of these questions. All the others will either have the potential to become ultimate alliances or not. When would some alliances never become ultimate alliances? Or, when would two individuals never join in that alliance?

That seems to only be possible when they share different values, when some member's values restrict him/her from from using some source of information or method of reasoning, or when the members don't have enough time to discuss a matter. Because, if everyone who believed in the same basic rules of reasoning (which most people do, although not for all problems) they are bound to reach the same conclusion, if they discuss the problem long enough.

Alliances between representatives and non-representatives

I believe alliances can be structured in at least four ways:

Non-representatives   - These, who gather for some purpose, only represent themselves. When they say ”I agree” they mean just that, that their own process of thought have led them to the conclusion that what someone said is true.

Constrained representatives  – These represent someone else's opinions and can be in the alliance only because they do so. If they step out of bounds their principals will select another agent to represent them.

Empowered representatives – These have some principals who give them their strength but they have faith in their representatives and will simply acquiesce in their decisions.

Similar representatives  – These have principals but they all think more or less the same. So if this representative takes a controversial stance, when the principal learn of the reason for it they will agree that it was the most prudent action.

The last three groups are probably difficult to differentiate in practice. No one would consider themselves to be principals of the first kind, but that might just be what most voters are.

Why is this important? Well, because large alliances probably needs to consist of representatives. Otherwise there would be too few decisions per meeting. If they need representatives to function effectively, it should be necessary that the representatives know enough about their principals, and vice versa. Because only then can members of an alliance select representatives who will reason and act just as they would, which seems to be the ideal.

Open and secret alliances

An alliance might have secrets they do not share with the rest of the society or they might be open about their intents and views. How open/secret an alliance is might be measured on a scale from one to ten. On the one end no one except the members of the alliance knows about its existence, its views or goals. On the other they post everything they do and think on twitter. In the middle people don't acknowledge they are part of any political alliance, or they keep their perspectives, strategies, or preferences a secret.

Change the World in the Most Efficient Manner

Followup to: Strive Towards the (Second) Best Society

If you know what political ideal to strive towards, what then is the most efficient strategy to pursue to achieve that goal?

To gain an understanding of this goal it might, again, be best to not list proposals and search arguments for them. Instead one should list facts which should be on one's mind when forming the optimal strategy. What sorts of facts are then important to know about?

They will probably have to do with how others change their behaviour. That is, people act according to pattern X today, and you want them to act according to pattern Y. What does one need to know when planning for this?

Similar to when trying to figure out what society best fits your ideal, you should now (1) list all possible political strategies, (2) list the most explanatory facts regarding how people change their behaviour, (3) list the facts that disparages most strategies, and (4) list all ideas which, if you knew them, would settle the matter or damn a whole many other strategies. (Also, saying one thing necessarily means saying the entire theory which supports that statement, which needs to be remembered when discussing with others.) 

Next are some examples for illustration:

Political strategies: Winning elections, the many forms of starting a revolution, secession or establishing a new society on uncontested lands, and some general techniques.

The general method (advice from Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard):

1. FOLLOW THE BRIGHT SPOTS. Investigate what's working and clone it.
2. SCRIPT THE CRITICAL MOVES. Don't think big picture, think in terms of specific behaviors.
3. POINT TO THE DESTINATION. Change is easier when you know where you're going and why it's worth it.
4. FIND THE FEELING. Knowing something isn' t enough to cause change. Make people feel something.
5. SHRINK THE CHANGE. Break down the change until it no longer spooks the Elephant.
6. GROW YOUR PEOPLE. Cultivate a sense of identity and instill the growth mindset.
7. TWEAK THE ENVIRONMENT. When the situation changes, the behavior changes. So change the situation.
8. BUILD HABITS. When behavior is habitual, it's "free"-it doesn't tax the Rider. Look for ways to encourage habits.
9. RALLY THE HERD. Behavior is contagious. Help it spread.
10. Direct the rider, motivate the elephant, and shape the path.

(The authors use the metaphors the rider and the elephant for our minds, originally from Buddha, recently written on by Jonathan Haidt and Daniel Kahneman. The rider is the self-aware part of the brain and the elephant is everything that does stuff automatically, sort of.)

The specific method:

1. "There are three main sources of influence that shape political orientation which creates long-term effects. [Family, teachers/instructors, and peers.]" (Theories of political behavior)

The search method:

1. "What will it take to get the necessary number of people to engage in one massive action, or series of actions, that will change the world into society/societies X/YZ?"
2. "How large is the necessary number?"

Strive Towards the (Second) Best Society

Followup to: Consider the Most Important Facts

Now, that you have written down your most important political goals and the most important facts which your world view consists of, it should be possible to determine what your most preferred political order should look like. Maybe it is futarchy? Or a social-democratic order? Or a transhumanistic world confederation?

Whatever you have calculated to be your best solution it may not be what you should be aiming towards. If the society you most want to live in is very different from your second preferred society, and working towards establishing one will decrease the chances of establishing another, there is potentially a dilemma here. (Such as, if one would either want a capitalistic or communistic society.) On the other hand, if working toward any society is a step towards any other you prefer, there is no conflict. Here, I'll assume there is one.

Let us say you have five particular political orders which you would say are each adequate, but that you can rank them clearly from good to better. Now, try and determine how easy it should be to reach these goals, let's just say in how many hours of work you need to put into it. To illustrate:

Rank	Option	Difficulty
1	Atlantis	1,000 years
2	Eden	1,500 years
3	Lemuria	50 years
4	Ultima Thule	500 years
5	Status Quo	Instant success

For the hypothetical person who have these societal preferences, the question is whether to pursue either the #1 or the #3 choice (#1 is, for these variables, superior to #2 and the same with #3 to #4). It could be solved easily enough, if all goals and costs were measured in the same nominator. Neoclassical economists do this by assuming everything can be nominated in monetary terms, even though it's not correct, but because it seems to be better than nothing. To illustrate, let's put some numbers to the societies above:

Option	Value ($)	Cost ($)	New Rank
Atlantis	5,000,000	4,000,000	2
Eden	4,500,000	6,000,000	5
Lemuria	4,000,000	100,000	1
Ultima Thule	3,900,000	5,000,000	4
Status Quo	1,000	0	3

So, when everything has been calculated for, this person should strive towards establishing Lemuria. After having followed the same logic you should be able to discover what your efficient political goal is.

How to make this calculation, then? To do so it is necessary to think about the most efficient strategy that can be used to, together with others, reach a certain society, This will also be useful if the most adequate societies you know of are very similar to each other, such as walking towards on is walking towards all, more or less. I'll discuss the question of best strategy in the next post.   

Consider the Most Important Facts

Followup to: Choose that which is most important to you

After you have written down what your own fundamental political goals are, the next step in creating your political ideology is to get an understanding of all possible societies so you can see which one is best. And by best I mean that society which comes closest to meeting your criteria of what you find most valuable.

So, to construct a model for thinking about this issue two things are needed. First, a list of all possible societies. For that I'll use, as a proxy, Wikipedia's list of economic systems and how they might vary with what culture is most prominent in that system.

Secondly, some lists of those facts which would seem to rule out the largest number of possible societies as not being best. My reasoning for that is the following:

Before considering any facts that has an impact on how you view a society, all societies should appear to be equally probable of being the best. This starting point may seem strange to some. It means that one should not dismiss even the policies of Nazi Germany out of hand. That is just the starting point however. After one accumulates more and more data some societies will appear less and less probable to be the one that best fulfill your criteria.And, since you don't have time to read everything, it is necessary to construct a model of how humans (and other beings, for post-singularity issues, which i'll skip discussing) function and interact, that first only considers the most important facts.

This could be done in several ways.

One could begin by just following normal science and ask what general facts can explain most of observed behavior and then see what those facts would predict about all societies. That seems wise to do, in and of itself, because it forces the discussion (which will ensue with others who follow the same method) to be very methodical and well grounded in a rich theory. One's own viewpoint will also be more likely to be true. This can be called the general method.

But this path is not the quickest, since these general facts would probably not damn enough societies to be unsuitable to your goals. A much faster way, but which will give a more sketchy painting, is to just list those facts which will rule out the most societies. These facts may be thought of by thinking on what assumptions certain systems rely on to work adequately and trying to figure out what facts disprove most of these assumptions. This can be called the specific method.

Then there are statements which you are uncertain about but if they were true, it would become really obvious what society is best. So, not facts actually, but those ideas which you believe are worth learning more about. These potential facts should be the ones you are pondering or those which are the root cause of many debates among those with similar goals. This can be called the search method.

So, for the first two method you'll write down what you already believe and for the third you'll write down what you don't know, but would like to know if they're true or not. Here's an illustration of them, using information from Wikipedia's articles on humans, society, societal collapse, war. I only took three examples for the specific method and search method.

The general method:

1. "Human societies are characterized by patterns of relationships (social relations) between individuals who share a distinctive culture and institutions; a given society may be described as the sum total of such relationships among its constituent members."
2. "Humans are distinguished from other primates by their bipedal locomotion, and especially by their relatively larger brain with its particularly well developed neocortex, prefrontal cortex and temporal lobes, which enable high levels of abstract reasoning, language, problem solving, and culture through social learning."
3. "Humans are adept at utilizing systems of symbolic communication such as language and art for self-expression, the exchange of ideas, and organization."
4. "Virtually all societies have developed some degree of inequality among their people through the process of social stratification, the division of members of a society into levels with unequal wealth, prestige, or power."
5. "The human brain, the focal point of the central nervous system in humans, controls the peripheral nervous system. In addition to controlling "lower", involuntary, or primarily autonomic activities such as respiration and digestion, it is also the locus of "higher" order functioning such as thought, reasoning, and abstraction."
6. "Humans are generally diurnal. The average sleep requirement is between seven and nine hours per day for an adult and nine to ten hours per day for a child; elderly people usually sleep for six to seven hours. Having less sleep than this is common among humans, even though sleep deprivation can have negative health effects. A sustained restriction of adult sleep to four hours per day has been shown to correlate with changes in physiology and mental state, including reduced memory, fatigue, aggression, and bodily discomfort."
7. "Humans are one of the relatively few species to have sufficient self-awareness to recognize themselves in a mirror."
8. "Motivation is the driving force of desire behind all deliberate actions of humans. Motivation is based on emotion—specifically, on the search for satisfaction (positive emotional experiences), and the avoidance of conflict."
9. "For humans, sexuality has important social functions: it creates physical intimacy, bonds and hierarchies among individuals, besides ensuring biological reproduction."
10. "The sexual division of humans into male and female has been marked culturally by a corresponding division of roles, norms, practices, dress, behavior, rights, duties, privileges, status, and power."

The specific method:

1. "Insofar as it is collaborative, a society can enable its members to benefit in ways that would not otherwise be possible on an individual basis; both individual and social (common) benefits can thus be distinguished, or in many cases found to overlap."
2.  "Common factors that may contribute to societal collapse are economic, environmental, social and cultural, but they manifest combined effects like a whole system out of balance. In some cases a natural disaster (e.g. tsunami, earthquake, massive fire or climate change) may seem to be an immediate cause. Other factors such as a Malthusian catastrophe, overpopulation or resource depletion might be the proximate cause of collapse. Significant inequity may combine with lack of loyalty to a central power structure and result in an oppressed lower class rising up and taking power from a smaller wealthy elite. The diversity of forms that societies evolve corresponds to diversity in their failures too."
3. "There is no scholarly agreement on which are the most common motivations for war. ... The one constant factor is war’s employment of organized violence and the resultant destruction of property and/ or lives that necessarily follows."

The search method:

1. Political system X will best achieve my goals.
2. Political system X leads to the best incentives for everyone to produce the most important collective goods.
3. Political system X leads to the best incentives for everyone to not hurt anyone else.

Now, these facts are not simply facts. They are the tip of a theoretical ice-berg; they are interpretation of reality. As such they will not by themselves explicate what system they damn. For oneself they should be clear what they mean, but if one should discuss it with others it might be necessary to write down the points and their theoretical point of view explicitly.

In any case, if you've followed my steps you should have one candidate which seems to be best. Or at least a few which seems equally good. If not, then consider some more facts and/or search for more knowledge. This step might, of course, take years. Next step is to estimate how much a political action towards these societies might cost.

Årsmöte med Ofuss

Ett år har gått och det har därför blivit dags igen för Ofuss att ha ett årsmöte. Den här gången blir det i Göteborg och det blir av på Liseberg! Så häng med, den 31 augusti!

Vad kan man förvänta sig av mötet? Niklas Wiklander skrev en bra sammanfattning:

Notera att det här årsmötet inte är som något årsmöte du någonsin varit på. Inga sega genomgångar av årets budget eller valberedningar eller så. Vi bara snackar lite (eller mycket) om ungefär vad vi ska göra med Ofuss fram till nästa sommar, sen åker vi berg-och-dalbana, sen kanske några (eller alla) går nånstans och dricker öl eller nåt liknande. Ju fler likasinnade vi är desto bättre! Så även om du inte varit med i "ledningen" för Ofuss alls, kom och ha kul på Liseberg! Bor du i Göteborg finns det ingen bra anledning alls att inte gå dit.

Hur tiden fördelas mellan diskussion, berg-och-dalbana och att gå på krogen bestäms efter vad folk tycker är rimligt. Ifall du har ett förslag på en kampanj eller något i den stilen skulle det vara jättebra att bara skriva ned några tankar om den, så att folk kan läsa på om det innan. Ta upp det i Ofuss-gruppen på fb eller i eventet.

Fb-event: Årsmöte på Liseberg